[Python-Dev] Build Notes for building trunk with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition (original) (raw)

Tim Golden mail at timgolden.me.uk
Fri Nov 23 16:06:14 CET 2007

Paul Moore wrote:

I have just built the current trunk version of Python on Windows, using the new PCBuild9 directory, and Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition.

Everything went extremely well. I include below my notes on what I did, for reference. To be honest, there's nothing in here that really warrants a change to the readme.txt - to all intents and purposes, the process "just works".

My experience also. Thanks v. much to Christian for the work on this one.

ssl ----

Christian has been making changes to allow this to build without Perl, so I gave it a try. I used openssl 0.9.8g, which I extracted to the build directory (I noticed afterwards that this is the same version as in Python svn, so I could have used the svn external!) I needed to download nasm (nasm.sf.net) version 2.00rc1, and rename nasm.exe to nasmw.exe and put it on my PATH.

Ah. Thanks for that last bit. I thought this might not build without the full VS, so I didn't try poking round for a nasm-alike.

I managed to fudge distutils around sufficiently to build the standard Pyrex primes testcase as an extension. I noticed that Christian has committed patches to the py3k trunk which do useful things with the vcvars.bat file to pick up the compiler environment, so I was going to email him privately to look at backporting those into 2.6. This, my first experience of hacking distutils, felt a little like clambering over a construction site, with lots of ungainly "if it's v6; if it's v7" stuff obviously reflecting the vagaries of Microsoft's registry layout changes over the different compiler flavours.

For practicality's sake I'd very much like to help get this to the point where you can build Python and extensions with the VS Express compilers (including, critically, the pywin32 stuff).

TJG

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